One Cold Night

to Susan’s fifth-floor loft.
    She then noticed the fleshy scar on his right cheekbone, just beneath his eye. His eyes were a musty green. The way he looked at her, directly, sent an electric shock through her body.
    She realized he wasn’t wearing a uniform. He had on regular street clothes — khaki pants, a black T-shirt and a jean jacket — and up close the FedEx cap looked dirty.
    She thought of the FedEx letter that had arrived mysteriously outside her door that morning. That horrendous letter. Her eyes frantically searched for the red emergency button at the top of the panel. Dropping the box of chocolates, she lunged for the red button, learning in an instant that urgency and fear together were like fire racing through your body to your brain; that every fraction of every moment felt like an hour; that it was impossible to move fast enough through a fog of panic.
    The red button was so close, just inches from her finger, when he popped open a small switchblade and jammed it into the edge of the inverted-arrows button that held the doors closed, simultaneously jamming shut the doors and shorting out the elevator. The lights blacked; then a harsh fluorescent emergency light filled the mirrored cube. The elevator ground to a halt somewhere, Susan thought, between floors four and five.
    “Who are you?” Her fear was so strong, it choked her voice to a whisper. She backed into the far corner of the elevator. Behind her, she frantically positioned the points of four keys between her fingers, creating a spiky weapon, as she had once been taught in a childhood self-defense class. “What do you want?”
    He came at her slowly, as if he had all the time in the world, his eyes boring into hers with a look of almost inspiration. She understood at once that this was the man the police had mistaken for Peter. Up close, she saw that he resembled Peter in only the most basicways: height, weight, and hair color. This man’s body was more tightly wound than Peter’s had ever been, and he was older, with a sinewy neck and a broader, squarer jaw. His hands were also squarish and strong: one hand reaching out to grab her, the other holding another, larger knife that in the mirrors multiplied to dozens of gleaming sharp edges closing in like a collection of jagged teeth.
    “He’s a smart guy, your husband,” he said in a voice that sounded hollow, dead in a way she had never heard a voice sound before. “Think he figured this out yet?”
    “Figured what out?”
    “Don’t act like you don’t know,” he sneered. “He thinks he’s smarter than me. He thinks he can catch me, but he can’t. And even if he did, there wouldn’t be any satisfaction in it — not now.”
    He took another slow step forward, clutching the knife. And she knew: He was the groom. She watched him approach her with the helpless terror of a slow-motion nightmare. Her parents were just half a floor above her and the police were just four flights below — and here she was, sandwiched between them, alone with a monster.
    “What makes you think he was trying to catch you?” She tried to flatten the tremble from her voice, but it was impossible.
    His sneer broadened into a full-blown smile, revealing teeth that were crooked and yellowed. “I left so many clues along the way and none of you saw them.”
    He was insane. She had no idea how to reach someone whose thinking was so skewed, but she had to try; there had to be some way into his mind.
    “We were stupid,” she said. “You’re right.”
    He nodded slowly. “You’re learning. That’s good. Your old boyfriend was an easy student too, especially when I took away his fancy pills.”
    He was just inches from her now.
    Her mind whirred in desperation to understand. Peter had had Lisa with him and was in custody now. Despite his lair at Seventy-seven Water Street, where he had been watching them — stalking them — for months... he wasn’t the groom.
    Yet the groom — this man — had somehow been an accomplice to Peter today. Or Peter had been made an accomplice to him.
    Susan’s fingers tightened around her splayed keys.
    Peter had had one agenda. And this man had another.
    He wasn’t after Lisa. He was after Dave; Dave’s heart: Susan. What he wanted was to hurt her.
    She gripped her keys and prepared to swing them forward, at his face, into his eyes. She needed him just a few inches closer.
    His left hand fell on her shoulder, fingers gripping into her flesh. He smiled again,